Starter Story Sunday Breakfast #2

Updated: July 21st, 2022

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1. The orange juice 🍊

This guy hit $1.2M/year in sales with a trendy overalls garment

He played Dr. Frankenstein with two unlikely clothing items (think sweatpants meets overalls) and the result has been incredibly successful.

However, like many other DTC businesses, they’re hurting due to the Apple vs Facebook war. Many companies (that originally mastered the formula of making a 2x ROAS on FB/IG ads) are forced to explore other channels (email, SMS, TikTok) to keep growing.

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2. The coffee  ☕️

This guy started a ShutterStock competitor and now has 1.4M customers.

The Internet has a never-ending need for images. Every blog post, every website, and every social media update needs images!

This case study reminds me: When the demand for something is so huge (stock images), we shouldn’t get discouraged by the presence of big competitors. These competitors aren’t able to please everyone, which means there’s always some value left to capture.

Idea: Go on Twitter and research opinions and tweets of the biggest products out there. See what people don’t like about those products, could you make something better?

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3. The eggs 🍳

This guy turned a failed business into a $120K/year website plugin.

Every day, more people get the courage to quit their 9 to 5 jobs and go for it, even when they don’t have a solid business.

That’s what this programmer did. He tried selling on Amazon and failed…

The good thing about failure, though, is that it can put your back against the wall, and sometimes that’s what you need to really make something work. And that’s exactly what this founder needed.

That failed experience resulted in him coding up a solution for a problem that annoyed him from the platform during his time as a seller. Soon after, his Chrome extension reached $10K in MRR.

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4. The toast 🥪

She makes $420K/year turning podcasts into articles.

Recording a podcast is relatively quick. That’s why lots of people do it.

But getting all that information and processing it to create great written content takes a lot of time. That’s why most people don’t do it.

And it’s a shame. That content could be used on your blog, social networks, newsletter, etc.

This business does it for you. It’s simple, yet genius.

Idea: The problem being solved here is that podcasters don’t have the time and resources to repurpose their content. What other services could be built to help podcasters? How about converting podcasts into clips that can be shared on Twitter? Or clips for YouTube? The list goes on.

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5. The pancakes 🥞

He turned a $5K investment into a $7.2M brand.

Friendly reminder: you don’t need a massive bank account to start a very successful business.

So what’s their secret? Creating t-shirts that targeted a very specific niche not being served on platforms like Amazon or Etsy.

Trying to be the winner of a popular mainstream trend is hard. Almost impossible. Niches always win!

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Enjoy your Sunday, and have a great week ahead!

meet the author
David Bustos

Hey there! 👋 I'm David, and if you ever got an email from Starter Story, I probably wrote it. With a background in working with startups and writing, being part of this team is kind of a perfect fit for me.